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RefSeek is Google for Students and Scientists

Google used to be a great tool for researchers, but then it got swarmed by billions of links from companies trying to sell you something. Clearing your way through all this information can be (and often is) counterproductive.

Enter RefSeek, an "academic" search engine, that launched today in beta. Simpler than Google even in appearance, RefSeek does not claim to offer more results than Google; instead, it strips any results not related to science, research and academia. It's different from Google Scholar, which only indexes articles from scientific publications; it's a fairly standard web search, only without all the commercial stuff. It claims to be indexing over one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.

In practice, this means that no matter what you're searching for you'll get a lot more results from .edu and .org sites as well as various online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia and Answers.com. It sounds simple enough, and the examples provided, such as "RNA" or "Carbon Nanotubes" yield good results, but does it work better than Google in the long run?

The answer is, as it so often is when you try to compete with the almighty Google, yes and no. To test it out I had to find some search terms that could be a topic for an academic paper and are at the same time very popular. Search for "80ies movies" was a flop; Google's results were solid, bringing me a bunch of sites dedicated to exactly this topic. Surprisingly, RefSeek gave priority to BitTorrent sites like Mininova, which is precisely the opposite of what I'd expect.

On searches for terms such as "film noir" or simply "football", RefSeek returned solid results, but besides giving a bit more weight to various .edu sites, I cannot say they were significantly better or more "academic" than Google's.

Finally, a search for "flowers" (which was admittedly recommended by RefSeek) revealed RefSeek's true strength. While Google almost exclusively returned links to florists, RefSeek brought me links about botany, which is probably what you'd want if you're researching this topic.

All in all, RefSeek is worth a try. Although it's not always successful in weeding out unneeded links from its results, it nearly always brought me a lot of relevant links. Unfortunately for RefSeek, once you start thinking from a scientist, student, or a researcher's standpoint, Google - surprisingly - doesn't fare all that bad, either.

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